Wayne Kramer, “The Hard Stuff”; <i> Epitaph</i>

This is the first solo album from Wayne Kramer, who emerged in the late 1960s as part of Detroit’s seminal, rabble-rousing heavy-rock band, the MC5. Kramer’s return is in one sense a throwback, a newly forged relic from a time when rock-as-aggression had not yet fragmented into heavy metal, punk and grunge, each faction bearing its own baggage of poses and pretensions and limiting thou-shalt-nots.

Backed by an array of sizzling, young West Coast rockers (including the band Claw Hammer and O.C. regulars Josh Freese and Randy Bradbury), Kramer leans heavily on his wah-wah pedal and delivers what his album title promises, which means that in sheer zooming force, “The Hard Stuff” sounds no more dated than electricity itself.

At the same time, he ventures what today’s punks rarely will: slowing down for a ballad, “Junkie Romance,” a sort of jaundiced, highly unromantic take on the urban-underbelly street life Bruce Springsteen limned with glamour in his similar-sounding “New York City Serenade,” or taking a sharp turn toward the avant-garde at the album’s midpoint with “Incident on Stock Island,” a taut, riveting piece of “spoken word” realism intensified by edgy, spontaneous rock instrumental commentary.

Kramer, whose old band was initially managed by ‘60s radical John Sinclair, hardly sounds dated lyrically: Songs such as “Bad Seed” and “Hope for Sale” could serve as rejoinders to the Newt Gingrich/Pete Wilson platform, howling with bitter irony at the tendency of the favored and the powerful to trample the poor and the marginal. Kramer’s vision leaves no room for optimism, and in “Pillar of Fire” it turns apocalyptic.

But he can also lift himself with the rock ‘n’ roll romantic’s belief in transcendent visions avowed in the chorus of his “Gimme Shelter”-like anthem, “The Realm of Pirate Kings.” Nor does he forget to laugh a little, in “Sharkskin Suit,” a raunchy-blues ode to the pleasures of dapper dressing (which Kramer admits are beyond his own budget).

“Edge of the Switchblade” is the only lyric given to nostalgia, with its self-aggrandizing elegy for halcyon days with the MC5. However, the song rocks so freely and authoritatively, with guitars cutting like the Stones at the height of their powers, that Kramer very nearly backs up his boasts.

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